A Vacation House Designed to Be a Fantasy Jungle Gym

Caption: When this Bangkok vacation home needed renovating, Thai architecture studio Onion decided to turn it into a sleek, indoor jungle gym.Photo: Onion

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Caption: The owners have four kids, and asked for something 'playful.'Photo: Onion

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Caption: The Onion team decided that an outdoor playground and pool slide would be too timid. So they turned the interior into three floors of bouncy nets, ramps, ladders, tunnels, and hidden sliding doors.Photo: Onion

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Caption: They also took cues from Tom and Jerry cartoons and designed half-circle 'Jerry holes' for windows and doors.Photo: Onion

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Caption: “We wanted to create continuous passage ways that more or less act like a maze so children can escape the adults, or play hide-and-seek," says design director Arisara Chaktranon.Photo: Onion

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For some parents, Chuck E. Cheese is an inescapable fact. And that’s not good. No matter how starry-eyed your kids are about the plastic ball pits, it’s Saturday afternoon and you’re still stuck in a bacterial indoor playground that serves crackers with ketchup that’s euphemistically called ‘pizza.’

The occupants of this beach house have no such worry. When the Bangkok vacation property needed renovating a couple years ago, the owners asked their architecture studio, Onion, for something playful. They have four children, so they proposed a playground. Nothing off-the-wall—the expectation was for something outdoors. But, says Onion design director Arisara Chaktranon: “We thought that was too timid. There was a swimming pool, but there would only be enough space for a slide.”

Onion

Instead, the Onion team turned almost all of the interiors of the Cha Am Beach house into a jungle gym. Like a game of Chutes and Ladders brought to life, the three floors link together via ramps, ladders, tunnels, and hidden sliding doors. Five layers of bouncy nets—made to “look like people are floating,” Chaktranon says—stretch from wall to wall. To make the house feel like more like a playground, “we didn’t want the circulation to be typical, like corridors that lead to the rooms,” Chaktranon says. “We wanted to create continuous passage ways that more or less act like a maze so children can escape the adults, or play hide-and-seek.” To encourage that kind of Pac-Man-esque, chase-or-be-chased play, Onion pulled visual cues from old Tom and Jerry cartoons. Upstairs, the half-circle doorways and window cutouts are what Chaktranon calls “Jerry curve holes.” (In honor of the mouse, they dubbed the home ‘Jerry House.’)

There is, of course, some flawed logic in turning a vacation home into a floor-to-ceiling indoor playground: Like a pair of shoes, kids can quickly grow out of it. The monochromatic coats of paint (in white, lavender, pale green, and honey-yellow) help stave off too much silliness, but because the nets are essentially big hammocks, that’s the design detail that might keep the house relevant over time. That’s enough to entice parents, or grandparents, to climb up with a pillow and a book. Indeed, on the family’s first night in the house—on New Year’s Eve—the parents woke up the next morning to find that their four boys had taken their bedding out onto the nets, to sleep in mid-air.